European schools, hospitals are next terror targets unless France’s Macron says sorry to Muslims: experts

Schools and hospitals in western Europe are likely to be the next targets of ‘lone wolf’ terrorists unless French President Emmanuel Macron apologises for his remarks on Islam and for defending the publication of cartoons featuring the Prophet Mohammed.

That’s the view of analysts who spoke to This Week in Asia following three deadly terror attacks over the past month in France and Austria.

“At this point no state is immune to terrorism. It could happen tomorrow in Germany, Spain, Denmark, the UK, Belgium,” said Olivier Guitta, managing director of GlobalStrat, an international security firm, warning that schools and hospitals were among “likely potential targets in the next few months”.

He said countries across Europe needed to raise their threat levels – as Britain did last week – following attacks in Nice and Vienna, as jihadist groups had been calling for further attacks at a time when “antagonism with Western values” was increasing.

Western Europe has been shocked by a string of deadly attacks that began on October 16, when French high schoolteacher Samuel Paty was beheaded by an attacker angered that he had shown his students cartoons of the Prophet published in 2015 by the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

Muslims consider any depiction of the Prophet as blasphemous. On October 29 three people were killed in a knife attack in the French city of Nice and on November 2 a heavily armed man shot dead four people in Vienna, Austria.